"Good, professionally developed tests of any sort give consistent results, which this one does not.Lord knows I am well aware of the standardized testing issues. I jsut hate tests that are poorly constructed; and unfortunately as near as I can tell that includes ALL I.Q. tests no matter who built them or delivers them; at least if you're "smarter" than about 140 or so.
As regards IQ testing for the 0.01% of the population six or more standard deviations above the mean, there are inherent problems. Standardizing such tests is next to impossible, and making them sufficiently challenging to measure fine variations among persons that gifted risks making them incapable of gauging ordinary intelligence, for a variety of reasons. So if you're one of those fortunate few, the numbers will always be wildly variable.
Myself, I don't obsess over it."
The highest I've ever scored on an I.Q. test was an estimated 200 (almost none of the tests even try to measure over 200, and anything over 140 is an estimate) when I was three years old. The lowest was 157. The mean is about 180.
They wanted to put me in first grade. I was both physically large enough (I was 5ft at 9, and I stopped growing between 12 and 13, at 6'2"), and emotionally mature enough (you wouldn't last long in my family if you weren't); but my mother was adamantly against "Treating me different because I was smart".
One of the many many huge parenting mistakes she made over the years. I love her, and she did her best, but even she admits she was a horrible mother.
Here's the thing though, I grew up in a family of loser geniuses. Not a one of my aunts and uncles has an I.Q. under 120, and most of them are over 140 - but none of them were able to deal with it, and all of them were and are basically losers in the game of life, given their intellectual capabilities; though some have made good.
Grandmother, grandfather, father, mother, all over 150. My father is a lifetime criminal who has spent more than half of MY lifetime in prison. My mother had one small business after another because she jsut couldnt live with a "normal" job, but after a few years she would abandon the previous business and move on to the next, even if it was successful; because she jsut didn't care or got bored.
I taught myself how to read between age two and three. By the time I was five I was regularly reading Steven King, Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert etc...
All of that put me into a "special" category for as long as I attended state schools (all of whom got extra money simply for having me there). My Mom hated it, but my grandfather LOVED every minute of it. Here I was, pride of the family, scion of the generation...
My family were (and are) such perfectionists it's kind of difficult to decribe. If I got a 98 in school, the comment was never "Great, an A", it was "Why didn't you get 100... wasn't there extra credit you could take".
I was poked, prodded, tested, turned inside out... I learned to fuck with psychobabblers heads by the time I was about 8. I would get every question right on the test, but deliberately invert the answer key, or deliberately get the hardest questions right and the easiest wrong etc...
When I was a kid my mother refused to let me skip grades, which I always found kind of irritating because I was doing high school course work by the time I was in 3rd grade, and college work by the time I was in 6th. She ABSOLUTELY refused to send me to private school full time, or any special schools for the gifted, both of which were makign me offers all the time. One time the state even tried to take me away from her because some psychiatrist said she was endangering my welfar by not letting me go. She DID at least let me attend the accelerated and supplemental classes.
By the time I was 13 I was just tired of it and I refused to participate in any more unless there was a clear and direct advantage to my doing so; or the law required it (like the CTBS, SB, and ASVAB).
It's funny, but I finished highschool with a 4.5 GPA (extra GPA credit was given in my school for AP classes) and too many incompletes and absences to graduate. I tested out of high school at 16, and went to college with enough advanced credit to be between a sophmore and a junior in my first semester.
I joined the Air Force the day I turned 17, and finished my degree (double major Aerospace Engineering and Comp. Sci. with a minor in math) while serving in the AF, at 19.
You know what I got out of it? Burned out at 24 with a failed marriage, a business and economy in the shitter, ulcers, overweight, overstressed...
All in all not worth it.
I wouldn't change my intelligence for theworld; it is part of the very definition of who I am. It's transparent to me; as I said in "The Smartness Cult". Sometimes people ask me why I'm so smart, or why I know all this stuff (or sometimes why I'm a know-it-all) and all I can say is "Why are you a girl, and I'm a boy".
And of course the one that always gets them "Yup, I've got an I.Q. over 180. That and $4.50 gets you a latte".
I won't even get into the cow orker issue...
Ahhh I'm just rambling. It's Saturday morning and I got up too early (girlfriend had to leave early for work, got up with her)...
